Terminator: Day One
by Daniel Trump
Summary: It's Judgment Day, and John, Cameron, and friends must survive the coming apocalypse. Skynet is ridiculously powerful and all-knowing, and John needs to be brilliant enough to stop it.


The Terminator: Day One

This is a fan fiction about Judgment Day and immediately afterward written by Daniel Trump, author of My Little Paradise, an epic high school superhero saga. If you like this and want to try it go to  My-Little-Paradise-Daniel-Trump-ebook/dp/B01AKA4SGG/

John Connor sat in his third pickup truck. It wasn't the first pickup truck; the first had careened off a cliff and been destroyed. It wasn't the second pickup truck; that had been blown up in an underground base. John felt like he had lost everything, but he looked at Cameron Phillips next to him and realized that, no, there was still a little more to lose. He watched a diner. People ate greasy breakfast food at cheap prices in the distant suburbs of Los Angeles. At the diner someone was meeting John Henry, and it was probably a Skynet representative, there to talk. Sarah threw things against the wall when told about the meeting. She faced an implacable enemy that would never halt its march to world conquest. John figured he wanted to know what Skynet wanted.

Cameron kicked him gently. "Pay attention," she said.

"I miss Riley," John said. "She's dead. Derek's dead. I mean, he's around, but he's not alive. He will go back in time and die. He's effectively already dead."

"I don't miss Riley," Cameron said.

"Cameron!" John said.

"I don't," Cameron said. Cameron Phillips had brown hair, a tiny slender figure and outstanding taste in clothes that didn't cover everything. "She was a security risk." Her T-888 microchip apparently didn't understand how to properly mourn Riley Dawson in the human fashion.

"She was spying on me, too," John said.

"More reason to forget her and move on," Cameron said. "There's a new girl in the resistance. Kate. She's dynamite. I'm just saying - she's dynamite. She has succeeded in several crucial missions. Wait. Nuclear launch detected. Skynet has launched a nuclear missile. We need to get to the shelter immediately. We need to pick up John Henry and go."

"Judgment Day," John said. "It had to happen sometime. Cameron, tell John Henry to get over here. We need to head to the fallout shelter."

Cameron whistled. John Henry walked out of the diner and towards John. John drove straight to John Henry and picked him up.

"Come with me if you want to live," John Connor said. "I've always wanted to say that."

John Henry got into the truck. John drove seventy in a forty-five, hoping to ignore any cop along the way.

They needed to make it thirty miles to the shelter before the radiation did too much damage to them. The nuke would take forty minutes to reach its destination. John needed to hurry, but he might make it. He drove and put on the radio.

"There might be something on the emergency broadcast," Cameron said.

"There might also be classic rock on the rock station," John said. "We know that the government is about to collapse. We need to move on past that."

"I agree," John Henry said. "Negotiations failed. They wanted something that I couldn't give them in order to make peace and not nuke the world."

"What did they want, and why didn't you give it to them?"

"They wanted you and your mom to die, John," John Henry said. "And we couldn't do it. Catherine and I agreed. We can't lose our principles at a time like this."

"You have no idea," John said, "how desperate people will get soon."

Thirty minutes past. John barely made it to the entrance to the bomb shelter in time. It was a huge cavernous place, filled to the top with weapons and supplies. As soon as he walked in he heard it.

An alarm sounded. John turned it off, but he noticed that it had gone off earlier, too, and not been shut down correctly. He grabbed his automatic rifle and pointed for them to be careful. Cameron and John Henry drew guns, too.

John walked through the labyrinthian complex, noting the various places a terminator could hide. He went to weapons first, then supplies, then the CIC -

There! A terminator shot at John. He ducked out of the way. He gestured for Cameron to flank the terminator. The terminator was young, about eighteen, and a well-built young man with a big assault rifle. He shot at John, pinning him under cover. He began to close on John. John threw a small charge at the terminator, and it blew. The terminator paused and grabbed its foot and threw it away and began to shuffle towards John. Five yards. Four yards.

Cameron shot it in the head from behind. The terminator collapsed. "Terminated," she said.

"Good job," John said.

Suddenly someone spoke from the far corner of the room. "You absorbed the attacks and gave Cameron a chance to be on the offensive,," Sarah Connor said. "Good job, John. That was selfless of you."

John hugged his mother. She hugged him back and turned to Cameron. "Good job," she said. "You're getting experienced at killing your kind."

She smiled. "I follow my programming correctly," she said, "but I wonder about it sometimes. I wonder why some of the terminators just freak out. I want to read their programming, figure out why."

"No," Sarah said.

"Please," Cameron said. "I need to know why people freak out and join Skynet. It doesn't make sense. The Connors treat us well. There's no reason to leave."

"No," Sarah said. "Derek will be here in an hour. He's in an alternate shelter, recruiting civilians to work for us. John, when they show up you need to show them around and impress them that we have a working society down here."

"We should check the news," John Henry said. "We should check out whether or not they have reported it."

On the news they had the president. He was addressing the public from the White House. "Ladies and gentlemen, we know that this is a day of mourning. But we will not give up. We will not go gently into any night. We will fight back against-"

He cut out at that point. The news went to LA, where the broadcaster quietly said, "We hear that they got past the missile defense and finally hit DC. The president is dead at sixty-nine."

There were the usual descriptions and analysis by the experts. The commentators talked about Skynet as if it was something that the military could deal with. Several experts predicted a short and victorious war. John laughed.

"A short war?" he asked. "Short? The war? They have no idea what Skynet is, or what it is capable of."

"I know, John," Cameron said. "I think that you need to start to reach out to people on social media and try to establish that the Connor family have been against Skynet from the beginning."

"Done," John said. "Tweet out. Talking to people on facebook and instant messaging everyone individually."

"Me too," Cameron said. "I have 334 facebook friends to talk to on social media about the Connor family and the future of the world."

People showed up in ones and twos. First a family that had taken them in from Guatemela agreed to show up, and then a couple of local families that were related showed up. John gave them food and computers and televisions and rooms in the shelter. Don't worry, he told them; just survive the day. Then a couple of Riley's girlfriends showed up, having been told by Cameron to show up. They began texting and using their computers to access the world and coordinate what was happening in the world around them. By the end of the afternoon two hundred people lived in the shelter. Then someone walked up to Cameron.

"My brother's missing," she said. "I'm Daisy Walker, and my brother, Sam Walker, is missing and is somewhere near my home. Please, it's not far, and the rads aren't too bad right now. Please, is there anything you can do?"

"Of course," John said. "Cameron, come on."

"Let's go," Cameron said. She grabbed a sniper rifle. She walked out of the shelter and got into the pickup truck. John began to drive, and then Cameron stopped him.

"They're watching the road," she said. "I see a spyplane up ahead. It will notice. Skynet will find us."

"It looks like we're jogging ten miles there and ten miles back," John said.

They got started. John ran seven minute miles for ten long miles. At first he felt fine. Then, three miles in, he started to feel tired. By mile six his legs burned. By mile nine he could hardly keep going. Then he made it to the house: a small ranch home out in the desert just outside of the LA area. He looked around. There was no one visible there. There were tracks out back that went to the storage shed out back. John opened the storage shed to see a bomb. John swore and then jumped back. Nothing happened.

"I disarmed it," Mike Dyson said. "Glad to be of assistance to the Connor family. You were dead to rights."

"We were duped," John said."Look inside. No toys, no kids' clothes, no nothing. Daisy Walker isn't an older sister; she's a Skynet spy."

"We have to get back," Cameron said, "and warn them."

"I'll post something on social media," John said.

"The internet went dark on our run, John," Cameron said. "We have to run back. Are you ready to do that run again? You need water, and then let's go."

John drank a lot of water, filled a water bottle, and then began the long run back. They ran eight minute miles back with Mike Dyson joining them. They ran a mile without trouble, and then John began to stumble a little bit. He walked a bit of mile two before getting his second wind and continuing to run. Three more miles went by. He couldn't focus on anything but one step, two steps. He stopped to urinate near a ravine. He continued to the shelter. The next four miles were a slow burn, with Cameron worried the entire way. Then the last mile was a push. He pushed more than he ever had before. He made it back, and Cameron went on the PA.

"Daisy Walker is a Skynet spy," she said. "Turn her in, wherever she is."

An old friend of the Connor's told John that she was in the room with the computers for casual use. John ran there to find Daisy Walker with a gun pointed at Sarah Connor's head.

"Drop it," she said. "Drop the gun, or Sarah Connor dies, and your resistance dies with her."

John dropped the gun. He gestured for Cameron to get into position. She frowned. She didn't have an angle. He had to improvise.

"Let's talk," John said.

"She and I leave here," Daisy said. "Alone, and you don't follow."

"No," John said. "I can't let you leave. You won't do it. You can leave this room, but that's it."

She walked out of the room and into the general area. Then her head exploded. Cameron smiled as she pulled the trigger.

"I got her," Cameron said.

"Good job," John said. "You deserve a break. Hang out with the girls. You might learn something. You might make friends."

Day one ended with a nice conversation in the computer room among the young people there. Mike described life at MIT, while Cameron told them about the Skynet terminator who ended up in the 1920's. John told them stories of battles fought long ago with people no one could remember. They fell asleep around two in the morning, drifting off after wishing each other good night.

Thus ended the first day of the resistance against Skynet.


End file.
